Hi all - well, Japan was great. We spent the week in Kyoto, which is beautiful this time of year with the fall colors. Saw lots of temples and a castle and the most beautiful gardens, and ate tons of noodles.
We started calling it the Land of Tortured Hair, because every one we saw practically had a bad haircut! Japanese women have beautiful hair, but apparently the current style is to dye it brown and cut it in a bad shag. We didn't see a single woman with long black natural hair the whole time. The guys had badly-cut short spiky hairdos - often less "edgy' and more "Audrey Hepburn". The amount of the GNP being spent on hair salons must be staggering!
It was pretty easy to get around because many signs were also in English, and the trains, busses and subways were very clearly marked. S17 got to show some of his prowess at reading Japanese by finding a restaurant we were looking for (the sign was only in Japanese). We also saw a friend's son who used to be in Japanese class with S17 - he's studying in Japan for a year and his apartment was just a couple blocks from our hotel.
The culture and the history are fascinating, although overall we didn't find the Japanese nearly as polite and friendly as the Thai or Vietnamese. (Not just to us, but to each other - in a busy subway station, my gaijin H was the only person to stop and help an elderly Japanese woman struggling to get her luggage up the steps.)
We did see two Geisha riding in a rickshaw one morning on a back street near a temple!
H and I had fun together, and we got to teach S17 a lot about travelling - we figure next time he travels to a foreign country, he probably won't have us along, so we made him do a lot of the work, navigating and communicating etc.
